One of first games I ever played at my dad's work when I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I've always enjoyed flight Sims, understanding this dubiously qualifies :). I've enjoyed the strategic aspect of fuel and bomb management and while the ai is simple, it provided a challenge.
I now have kids of my own; over the winter I setup an old laptop with old games, and started introducing them chronologically to games like Sopwith, Paratrooper, Alley Cat etc.
My 6 year olds son comment on this game in his journal:
"I like: everything. I don't like: nothing."
Took me a second to not over interpret the seeming double negative :-)
Update : years later I played wings of fury on my cousin's amiga 500 ; far better game but not the same magic :)
The first time I ever saw a PC it was running Sopwith. Must have been 1989. I loved the game, but it was this exotic new machine that really interested me. It had 5.25” floppies, probably a 286 and quite an old machine by then.
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
The classic Sopwith clone from the golden days of the Finnish shareware game scene, Triplane Turmoil, turns thirty this year. It was open sourced in 2009 and community-ported to more modern platforms via SDL. Was a lot of fun back in the days of shared-keyboard multiplayer.
I loved Sopwith as a child and back in 2004 I made my own version 'Camel' as a homage to Sopwith https://sopwithcamel.sourceforge.net/ to get myself a job in the games industry. Hard to compete with the original though. :)
I remember playing this on my families Olivetti M24. It was very difficult. Maybe because the game was speed sensitive and the M24 was an 8086 running 8Mhz. Good times nonetheless.
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I now have kids of my own; over the winter I setup an old laptop with old games, and started introducing them chronologically to games like Sopwith, Paratrooper, Alley Cat etc.
My 6 year olds son comment on this game in his journal:
"I like: everything. I don't like: nothing."
Took me a second to not over interpret the seeming double negative :-)
Update : years later I played wings of fury on my cousin's amiga 500 ; far better game but not the same magic :)
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplane_Turmoil
The multiplayer game Altitude was a good modern example.